After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul was assaulted at his own home, left-wing media figure Elie Mystal claimed that violence is the Republicans’ “endgame” — and progressive Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York appeared to endorse the sentiment by retweeting Mystal’s post without adding any comment.
“This is the future the Republicans want. It’s the future they’ve literally been calling for on television. This is why they are so excited about the new overlord of Twitter. This, the violence, has always been their endgame. And if they win they will only get worse,” Mystal tweeted.
Mystal was making the comments while retweeting a tweet from Paul Kane of the Washington Post, who wrote that according to a source, the assailant had asked, “Where is Nancy, where is Nancy?” prior to the attack.
According to a statement from a spokesperson for House Speaker Pelosi, the lawmaker was not in San Francisco when the attack occurred. Paul Pelosi had “successful surgery to repair a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands” and is expected to fully recover, according to another statement.
During an appearance on the Fox News Channel, GOP Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas said that he believes allowing criminals out on bail instead of locking them up “created the environment where this happens.”
Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in response, “Or maybe a billionaire-fueled propaganda channel that regularly generates high volumes of death threats to elected officials while pumping propaganda for an extreme right-wing that openly embraces fascism is what’s creating ‘the environment where it happened.'”
California state Sen. Scott Wiener claimed in a statement that the assault was “the direct result of toxic right wing rhetoric and incitement against Speaker Pelosi and so many other progressive leaders.”